Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and Surveillance Capitalism

Whether it creeps into politics, marketing, or simple
profiling, the nature of surveillance as totality has been
affirmed by certain events this decade. The Edward Snowden
disclosures of 2013 demonstrated the complicity and
collusion between Silicon Valley and the technological
stewards of the national security state.

It took the
election of Donald J. Trump in 2016 to move the issue of
social media profiling, sharing and targeting of
information, to another level. Not only could companies
such as Facebook monetise their user base; those details
could, in turn, be plundered, mined and exploited for
political purpose.

As a social phenomenon, Facebook could
not help but become a juggernaut inimical to the private
sphere it has so comprehensively colonised. “Facebook in
particular,” claimed WikiLeaks’ Julian Assange in May 2011, “is the
most appalling spy machine that has ever been invented.”
It furnished “the world’s most comprehensive database
about people, their relationships, their names, their
addresses, their locations, their communications with each
other, and their relatives, all sitting within the United
States, all accessible to US intelligence.”

Now, the
unsurprising role played by Cambridge Analytica with its
Facebook accessory to politicise and monetise data reveals
the tenuous ground notions of privacy rest upon. Outrage
and uproar has been registered, much of it to do with a
simple fact: data was used to manipulate, massage and
deliver a result to Trump – or so goes the presumption.
An instructive lesson here would be to run the
counter-factual: had Hillary Clinton won, would this
seething discontent be quite so enthusiastic?

Be that as
it may, the spoliations of Cambridge Analytica are embedded
in a broader undertaking: the evisceration of privacy, and
the generation of user profiles gathered through modern
humanity’s most remarkable surveillance machine. The
clincher here is the link with Facebook, though the company insists that it “received data
from a contractor, which we deleted after Facebook told us
the contractor had breached their terms of service.”

Both Facebook and Cambridge Analytica have attempted to
isolate and distance that particular contractor, a certain
Aleksandr Kogan, the Cambridge University researcher whose
personality quiz app “thisisyourdigitallife” farmed the
personal data of some 50 million users who were then
micro-targeted for reasons of political advertising.

The
sinister genius behind this was the ballooning from the
initial downloads – some 270,000 people – who exchanged
personal data on their friends including their “likes”
for personality predictions. A broader data set of profiles
were thereby created and quarried.

Kogan claims to have been approached by
Cambridge Analytica, rather than the other way around,
regarding “terms of usage of Facebook data”. He was
also reassured that the scheme was legal, being
“commercial” in nature and typical of the way “tens of
thousands of apps” were using social media data. But it
took Cambridge Analytica’s whistleblower, Christopher Wylie, to reveal that data
obtained via Kogan’s app was, in fact, used for
micro-targeting the US electorate in breach of privacy
protocols.

Mark Zuckerberg’s response has entailed
vigorous hand washing. In 2015, he claims that Facebook had
learned that Cambridge Analytica shared data from Kogan’s
app. “It is against our policies for developers to share
data without other people’s consent, so we immediately
banned Kogan’s app from our platform”. Certifications
were duly provided that such data had been deleted, though
the crew at Facebook evidently took these at unverified face
value. Not so, as matters transpired, leading to the claim
that trust had not only been breached between Facebook,
Kogan and Cambridge Analytica, but with the users
themselves.

Facebook, for its part, has been modestly
contrite. “We have a responsibility to protect your
data,” went Zuckerberg in a statement, “and if we can’t
then we don’t deserve to serve you.” His posted
statement attempts to water down the fuss. Data protections
– most of them, at least – were already being put in
place. He described the limitations placed on the accessing
of user information by data apps connected to Facebook
friends.

The networked sphere, as it is termed in with
jargon-heavy fondness by some academics, has seen the
accumulation of data all set and readied for the “information civilisation”.
Google’s chief economist Hal Varian has been singled out
for special interest, keen on what he terms, in truly benign
fashion, “computer-mediated transactions”.
These entail “data extraction and analysis,” various
“new contractual forms” arising from “better
monitoring”, “personalisation and customisation” and
“continuous experiments”.

Such are the vagaries of the
information age. As a user of such freely provided services,
users are before a naked confessional, conceding and
surrendering identities to third parties with Faustian ease.
This surrender has its invidious by products, supplying
intelligence and security services accessible data.

Cambridge Analytica, for its part, sets
itself up as an apotheosis of the information civilisation,
a benevolent, professionally driven information hitman.
“Data drives all we do,” it boldly states to potential
clients. “Cambridge Analytica uses data to change
audience behaviour.”

This sounds rather different to the
company’s stance on Saturday, when it claimed that, “Advertising is not
coercive; people are smarter than that.” With cold show
insistence, it insisted that, “This isn’t a spy
movie.”

Two services are provided suggesting that
people are not, in the minds of its bewitchers, that
intelligent: the arm of data-driven marketing designed to
“improve your brand’s marketing effectiveness by
changing consumer behaviour” and that of “data-driven
campaigns” where “greater influence” is attained
through “knowing your electorate better”.

On the
latter, it is boastful, claiming to have supported over 100
campaigns across five continents. “Within the United
States alone, we have played a pivotal role in winning
presidential races as well as congressional and state
elections.”

CA has donned its combat fatigues to battle
critics. Its Board of Directors has suspended CEO
Alexander Nix, claiming that “recent comments secretly
recorded by Channel 4 and other allegations do not represent
the values or operations of the firm and his suspension
reflects the seriousness with which we view this
violation.”

The comments in question, caught in an
undercover video, show Nix offering a range of services to the
Channel 4 undercover reporter: Ukrainian sex workers posing
as “honey-traps”; a video evidencing corruption that
might be uploaded to the Internet; and operations with
former spies. “We can set up fake IDs and Web sites, we
can be students doing research projects attached to a
university; we can be tourists.”

The company has also
attempted to debunk a set of what it sees as flourishing
myths. It has not, for instance, been uncooperative with
the UK’s data regulator, the Information Commissioner’s
Office, having engaged it since February 2017. It rejects
notions that it peddles fake news. “Fake news is a
serious concern for all of us in the marketing industry.”
(Nix’s cavalier advertising to prospective clients
suggests otherwise.)

In other respects, Cambridge
Analytica also rejected using Facebook data in its
political models, despite having obtained that same data.
“We ran a standard political data science program with the
same kind of political preference models used by other
presidential campaigns.” Nor did it use personality profiles for
the 2016 US Presidential election. Having only hopped on
board in June, “we focused on the core elements of a core
political data science program.”

The company’s weasel
wording has certainly been extensive. Nix has done much to
meander, dodge and contradict. On the one hand, he would
like to take credit for the company’s product – the
swaying of a US election. But in doing so, it did not use
“psychographic” profiles.

Surveillance capitalism is
the rope which binds the actors of this latest drama in the
annals of privacy’s demise. There are discussions that
political data mining designed to manipulate and sway
elections be considered in the same way political donations
are. But in the US, where money and political information
are oft confused as matters of freedom, movement on this
will be slow. The likes of Cambridge Analytica and similar
information mercenaries will continue thriving.

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